The cover of this disc
has a cartoon of Liszt which I feel
I ought to recognise (it’s unacknowledged
and has an indecipherable squiggle of
a signature at the bottom); the Liszt
of popular legend, his arms and fingers
flailing like octopuses, the whole keyboard
buckling and rising like a ship breaking
up in a storm, while the old hypocrite
has a beatific smile and a halo over
his head. This image of the composer
dies hard, but listen to the words of
Stanford who, as a young and impressionable
young man in his early twenties, heard
Liszt play at a semi-private gathering
and recalled the event many years later:

"He was the
very reverse of all my anticipations,
which inclined me, perhaps from
the caricatures familiar to me from
my boyhood, to expect to see an
inspired acrobat, with high-action
arms, and wild locks falling on
the keys. I saw instead a dignified
composed figure, who sat like a
rock, never indulging in a theatrical
gesture, or helping out his amazingly
full tone with the splashes and
crashes of a charlatan, producing
all his effects with the simplest
means, and giving the impression
of such ease that the most difficult
passages seemed like child’s play"
(Pages from an Unwritten Diary,
Edward Arnold 1914, pp.148-9).

So how do you play
Liszt? Well, I studied certain of his
works (not the Transcendental Studies)
with the redoubtable Ilonka Deckers-Küszler,
who was most insistent that this music
was to be played with the same respect
for the text you would think right for
a Beethoven sonata, without rhythmic
distortions, manic rubato or any other
playing to the gallery. In other words,
you play it like the good music it is.
Furthermore, Deckers-Küszler did
not claim this as a discovery of her
own; she was taught it at the Conservatoire
of her native Budapest in the early
years of the 20th Century,
and there were teachers there who had
it from Liszt.

Unfortunately, Ilonka
Deckers-Küszler was a somewhat
mysterious character who never committed
any of her playing to disc; she felt,
however, that her ideas were preserved
in the series of Liszt recordings made
by her tragically short-lived pupil
Edith Farnadi for Westminster. Alas,
these have never been readily accessible
and I have never yet succeeded in hearing
any of them, or even in knowing exactly
which works were recorded. Also of interest
would be the Liszt recordings by Louis
Kentner, who studied at Budapest Conservatoire
at about the same time as Deckers-Küszler.
Again, I have never succeeded in tracking
them down.

But what has all this
to do with Joyce Hatto? Quite simply,
that she too sits down at the piano
and, with technical nonchalance but
a complete lack of any virtuoso fuss,
just gets on with playing the pieces
"straight", like the good
music they are. Whether she learnt this
from some past teacher or whether her
instincts led her this way I know not,
nor does it matter much. She is in that
royal line of Liszt interpreters who
believe this is great music and is to
be played as such.

Now, what you won’t
get from Hatto is the sort of filigree
passage-work that makes you gasp at
the sheer crystalline evenness of it
all. Her passage-work is good, but it
is not part of her agenda to parade
its "goodness" as an end in
itself. In other words, if it’s Liszt
the circus-master you’re after, you
won’t get it. But if you have resisted
Liszt because of his showy image, then
these wonderfully musicianly performances
might make you change your mind.

If there is any shortcoming,
it is that Hatto tends more towards
healthy robustness than to winsome poetry.
The booklet reprints 1956 notes by Humphrey
Searle, according to whom Harmonies
du Soir "conjures up the atmosphere
of a peaceful evening with the distant
echoes of bells". Here Hatto, for
better or for worse, is full-toned and
intense.

The recording dates
are eleven years apart. The sound is
fairly consistent nonetheless, warm
and pleasing if not especially lifelike.
All the same, if you care about Liszt
the composer you should not miss
this disc.

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